FanDuel: Play your tournament like Groundhog Day

All season long in this space, I’ve talked about FanDuel strategies. And so far, every single one of those strategies has presupposed one thing.

You are picking a roster. One.

One of the things about many FanDuel tournaments is that they accept multiple entries. You could, of course, enter the same roster two, three, eight times, if you are supremely confident in said roster. But that’s asking a lot.

If you spend some time searching around some of the most successful FanDuel players, you’ll see that they use the multi-entry tournaments as exactly that, and they enter the same tournament a bunch of times. And hey, if they’re successful doing it, we can, too.

Here’s the thing: In the big tournaments -- obviously -- the prizes are top-heavy. I’ll use my tournament this weekend as an example. In this tournament, 7,326 spots pay out on a $2 entry. That’s a lot, sure. But only 300 spots pay out $20 or more. Only 20 spots go for more than $100. And it’s not until the top five that you can get $1,000, accelerating up to a $6,000 first prize.

So if you enter once, for $2, there’s a reasonable chance you could come out of that with $5. Not a great chance, but a reasonable one. And if you can do that most every week, you’ll find yourself making a profit in FanDuel. But you know what you won’t find? You won’t ever find yourself in one of those fancy commercials. You won’t ever go Scrooge McDuck-ing through the money you won.

And if you enter once, sure, maybe you hit it big with six grand. Someone’s got to win. But let’s say you have a 0.04 percent chance at making $100 on your entry -- which is basically the situation in this tournament. Now, your chances of small profit is about 15 percent, but you aren’t going to tweet about turning $2 into $5.

But say you enter that same tournament five times. Your shot at $100-plus is still only 0.2 percent, but looking at it a different way, you are five times more likely to turn a big profit.

It’s a $2 entry. If you lose that $2, oh well. Then, turn it into a $10 entry. At a $10 entry, you have roughly a 75 percent chance of getting back at least $5. Heck, your chances of getting your money back with five entries are far better than the chances of getting $2 back on a single entry.

But we aren’t really that interested in a tiny profit, in breaking even. We want to hit it big. And sure, it’s five times as expensive to enter a tournament a bunch of times. But if you win big, you won’t care if you won big on one entry or 20. And if you win a little or lose, oh well, one entry is the same as five.

There’s a lot of benefit to a multi-entry. So this week, that’s what I’m doing. I’ve played on $10 every week, turning a $50 starting investment into (so far) $206. That’s been on two games each week -- a $5 tournament, and a $5 50/50. This week, I’m using that same $10, but I’m entering that $2 game five times.

Here are my rosters. (For ease of reading, I’m not going to list all the salaries and opponents this time, but rest assured all these rosters fit in the salary cap, and they all ... you know, have opponents):

I’m not going to break each one of them down. But I like them all, for different reasons. Good chance one, two, maybe three of these rosters crashes and burns. But I can’t reasonably envision a scenario in which all five do. Absolute worst-case reasonable scenario I can envision is that I lose $5 this week, and honestly, even that seems kind of unlikely, with as varied a group of players as I have.

Get out there and enter. And enter. And enter. And ...